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This chapter juxtaposes the Arabic prose fiction of the Palestinian Israeli writer Emile Habiby (1922–1996) and the Iraqi Jewish writer Samir Naqqash (1938–2004). Habiby was a major figure in the Israeli political and cultural landscapes as well as in Modern Arabic literature. Naqqash was the most important contemporary Jewish writer of Arabic, yet remains virtually unknown. As two native speakers of Arabic who wrote Arabic prose fiction in Israel, they offer an illuminating, if unorthodox, point of comparison. The chapter explores the poetics of misunderstanding in their fiction, elucidating how they thematize communicative failure as one means of contesting dominant historical narratives and undermining their faulty logic. It also offers the first comparative study of Habiby's critical reception in both Arabic and Hebrew, based on a bilingual reading of his masterpiece al-Mutasha'il (The Pessoptimist).

This chapter presents some outlines of the diachronic intersystemic development of the modern Arabic literary system. The space between the text, its author, and the reader is understood as constituting both an economic environment (e.g. literary markets, publishing) and a sociocommunicative system that passes the meaning potential of the text through various filters (e.g. criticism, literary circles, groups, salons, public opinion) in order to concretize and realize it. All other spaces related to literary production and consumption, including the linguistic, spiritual, social, national, and economic spaces, are also considered, together with looking at the interaction of literature with, for example, religion, territory, state nationalism, language, politics, economy, gender, electronic media, and philosophy, as well as foreign literatures and cultures and examples of reciprocal interference between Arabic and Western literatures in the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first century.

This chapter looks at the literary dynamics of Arabic literature in synchronic cross-section. Inventories of canonized and non-canonized literary texts are presented separately in three subsystems: texts for adults, children’s literature, and texts in translation. The resulting six subsystems ― three canonized and three non-canonized ― are seen as autonomous networks of relationships and as interacting literary networks on various levels. The internal and external interrelationships and interactions between the various subsystems need to be studied if we want to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the modern Arabic literary system. The structure of the canonical center of the Arabic literary system is discussed referring to the phenomenon of Islamist literature and the reasons for its exclusion from the secular literary center.

This chapter concentrates on the importance of referring to the historical, diachronic development each genre in Arabic literature has been undergoing underwent and the relationships that exist between genres. As with any scholarly treatment of genre, it refers to the developing innovations and discussions of genre theory and the question, “What is genre?” Crucial in this regard is the concept of periodization, that is, how one is to delimit and define “literary periods.” Since literary genres do not emerge in a vacuum, the issue of generic development cannot be confined to certain time spans, and emphasis is placed on the relationship between modern literature, on the one hand, and classical and medieval literature, on the other. The complete study of the historical, diachronic development of literary dynamics requires an analysis of every genre and sub-genre, of the interrelationships and interactions between the genres, as well as of the interactions and interrelationships between the genres and the sub-genres. For reasons of practicality, the chapter relates to only three main genres: poetry, fiction, and theatre.

The relationship between Arabic literature and Persian literature falls under two major topics: the impact of Arabic literature on Persian literature, and the transmission and adaptation of Arabic literary texts into Persian. This chapter examines the development of Persian literature during the Seljuq period by investigating the relationship that exists between this development and previous Arabic literary works. This approach relies on the concept of ‘intertextuality’ — an approach that proposes to see texts as fragments in open and endless relations with other texts. The concern of this chapter is on the Seljuq period and the historic land of Persians (bilād fāris) which covers the territories whose native citizens had Persian as their mother tongue. This included Iran with some territorial extensions on the periphery. Although the Seljuq period lasted for only a century, it nevertheless determined the future destiny of Persian literature. From the invasions of Chagri Beg and Tughril Beg until the death of Sanjar, Iran underwent a major transition from literary Arabism to literary performance in Persian. To understand Persian/Arabic intertextuality in the Seljuq area, the chapter investigates the evolution of Arabic literature in Iran in the centuries that followed the Arab invasion. In this chapter, the Persian Maqāmāt by Abū Bakr Hamīd al-Dīn ،Umar b. Mahmūd al-Balkhī ،al-Hamīdī is examined to prove or falsify the theory that Persian literature remained highly indebted to the existing tradition of Arabic literature.

This chapter discusses issues concerning the language and culture of Arab minority in Israel during the period from 1967—1981. The Arabs value their language, not only as a means of communication but also as a symbol of ethnic and cultural identity, and as one of the essential bases for the preservation of their existence. However, most economic life, banking, politics, and military matters are conducted in the Hebrew language. This left the Arabs in a dilemma of whether to learn Hebrew at the expense of Arabic or sacrifice the linguistic inadequacy of Arab school graduates. Arabic literature in Israel continued to evolve after the British rule in Palestine, however, in recent times publications of a political nature have been censored by the Jewish authority.

This chapter sets out the theoretical framework that underlies the Arabic literary system, outlining the scope of the research subject and the assumptions behind the operative theoretical model. It looks also at the question of how popular literature can be given aesthetic legitimation and refers to the delimiting factors between canonized and non-canonized texts as well as between aesthetic and non-aesthetic objects that are by no means static. The chapter shows how canonicity in Arabic literature generally depends on the language of production: The standard Arabic language (fuṣḥā) is the basic medium of canonized texts, whereas the vernacular language (‘āmmiyya) is that of non-canonized texts.

Literature is an effective vehicle of expressing national energies, conflicts and aspirations. Literary translation aids in getting them across to another nation, where they will be received and interpreted according to the state of political and inter-cultural contacts between source and target literatures at the time when a particular translation is made and published. It is responsible for answering, first the question of whether a particular text is to be translated at all – and if so, why, by whom, and where it will be published – and next, the question of how it will be received by target readers: whether ignored, praised or rejected. This chapter aims to answer these questions with regard to two important segments of translation, of both classical and modern Arabic literature into Hebrew representing two opposite poles from the advent of Zionism in Palestine to the present day (1868 to 2005). The first pole demonstrates the way translations from Arabic into Hebrew were used to consolidate Jewish identity during the earliest stage of Jewish nation building in Palestine. The second demonstrates the earliest stage of recognition of the Palestinian national identity by Israeli Jewish culture. The data employed in the chapter draw on a comprehensive bibliography comprising over seven thousand translated items, as well as book reviews of translations of Arabic literature published in literary supplements of Hebrew dailies and weeklies, as well as literary magazines. The theory applied here is a modified combination of the work of two Israeli translation scholars, Itamar Even Zohar and Gideon Toury, both of Tel Aviv University.

This chapter examines how discussions of world literature relate to the field of Arabic literature by tracing how the Arabic term adab became literary. It considers how definitions of the literary turn on assertions of how to read, respond, and relate to texts by analyzing literary history, on the one hand, as it intersects with literary theory, on the other, to focus on finite moments in the work of Jurji Zaydan, H. A. R. Gibb, and Edward Said. The chapter shows that this convergence of literature and adab ultimately enables an alternate genealogy of world literature—one based less on the accumulation of texts than on an emergent global discipline. It argues that asking about how adab becomes literary is intertwined with the question of what literature is and with the overlapping of philology and pedagogy it implies.

This chapter shows the development of the private press from the years 1855 to 1882. Lebanon in the mid-nineteenth century was the scene of growing intellectual ferment. Printing was advancing. Lebanon would blaze the trail for the cultural and later nationalist society. They pioneered in the revival of language and literature and the establishment of theater and the press. For the Ottoman government, the publication of an Arabic paper in the capital by someone of Shidyaq's acumen was a development of advantageous potential. Shidyaq was at once an authority on Arabic literature and grammar well-versed in European culture. Europe, the new home of so many Arab political activists became an important base for the ideological struggle for political freedom. During the later years, expatriate Arab writers would continue to publish in Europe and elsewhere but with a different objective: they would cater mainly to the ever expanding communities of Arab emigrants.

This chapter calls for a study of Arabic literature from a comparative perspective, arguing that a comparative approach will help to undermine self-centricism and thus allow a more humanist perspective to dominate the field. Although comparative literature is meant to be ‘a discipline of tolerance’, the chapter accuses scholars on both sides of the divide of trying to deny the importance of this interaction in bringing about the changes we witnessed in the histories of Arabic and other world literatures. It cites one example of this intolerance: the West's continued refusal to acknowledge any role played by the Hispano-Arabic strophic poetry Muwashshah and Zajal in the emergence of the twelfth-century Troubadour songs. The chapter also considers one factor that justifies the need for a comparative approach to Arabic literature: the multi-cultural nature of the new Mahjar literatures produced by Arab writers all over the world in Arabic and other living languages.

The beginnings of modern Arabic literature in Egypt can be traced back to the era of Muhammad 'Ali, who took several measures to establish the foundations of the modern state. Muhammad 'Ali sent his famed educational missions to France and Italy to equip Egyptian students with Western sciences, and he founded a modern educational system based on the Western model that operated parallel to the traditional educational system headed by al-Azhar. The development and spread of the press played an important role in disseminating and fostering creative writing. Egypt became the center of enlightenment and culture in the Arab world, attracting intellectuals from various Arab countries who were fleeing the tyranny of rulers and searching for freedom. Women writers have trodden many paths in their aspirations to participate in shaping their own identities.

This book examines the role literature played in constructing, articulating or challenging interpretations of national identities in the Middle East, and most of its chapters are hence devoted to Arabic literature. The remaining chapters look into Hebrew literature, Arabic literature in translation and Arab literature in its trans-national mode as expressed in a language other than Arabic, in this case English. In terms of genre, the book covers poetry and the novel in their capacity as the prime examples of high culture, as well as oral or ‘folk literature’ in the modern period as an expression of the localisation of the lived socio-political experience of a national group. In terms of provenance, some chapters deal with the literary expression of Palestinian nationalism as the enunciation of a ‘stateless’ or ‘refugee’ nation, while others cover the construction of national identity in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon and Israel. These analyses provide an array of geographies and sociopolitical contexts that can add to the better understanding of the interaction between literature and the nation in the Middle East. Drama is not dealt with in the book because of its marginal position in the national cultures of the region. Furthermore, the book does not cover the short story or North Africa due to the limitations of space.

This book raises a number of questions concerning the assumed universalism of world literature by analyzing the interwoven strands of modernization, literature, and secularism. It examines the putative opposition between a practice of reading based on memorization, embodiment, and recitation in Qur'anic schools and another practice based on reflection, critique, and judgment, increasingly integral to what gets defined as literacy in the modern Egyptian state. By taking colonial Egypt as a paradigmatic site from which to consider literary publics, textual cultures, and the history of reading, the book reveals two convergent and enmeshed narratives: on the one hand, the formation of a modern literary paradigm linked to education reform, the rise of a reading public and modern Arabic literature, and on the other hand, the story of what gets blotted out, religious institutions and practices that come to be understood as traditional.

This book is about the life and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi, who may be regarded as the father of the study of modern Arabic literature in the United Kingdom and the United States based on the impact of his career and his publications. Badawi's arrival at Oxford University in 1964 as lecturer in modern Arabic literature transformed the teaching of and research into this subject in western academia. Trained in the University of Alexandria and in the UK in English literature, Badawi applied his passion for teaching, researching and translating English literature and criticism to the modern literature of his native language. This book begins with Alexandria, the city that exerted a key formative influence on the cosmopolitan culture characteristic of Badawi as individual and scholar. It goes on to document Badawi's intellectual and literary journey through his life as scholar, critic and translator and ends with a discussion of Badawi's academic legacy.

This chapter discusses modern Arabic literature as seen in the late nineteenth century by focusing on Jurji Ibrahim Murqus's contribution to Vseobshchaya Istoriya literatury (Universal History of Literature), edited by V. F. Korsh and A. I. Kirpichnikov. Murqus was a Syrian academic migrant who left Damascus in 1860. He studied at the Faculty of Oriental Languages of the University of St Petersburg and taught Arabic at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow. This chapter presents a slightly abridged rendering of Murqus's text, which concentrates on the evolution of the Arabic language, on prose writers and on translators. It also considers Murqus's position where prose genres are concerned, with particular emphasis on his recognition of the significance of travel writing, as well as his views on translation. Finally, it suggests that Mustafa Badawi would have disputed some of Murqus's statements on sound scholarly grounds.

In this chapter, the author offers a personal testimony about his interaction with Mustafa Badawi as well as the latter's contribution to the study of both Arabic and English literature. The author remembers the day he returned to Oxford University to take part in a colloquium commemorating Badawi's life and work; it was also the fortieth anniversary of his arrival in Oxford for the first time in March 1973, thanks to Badawi's insight and initiative. He also cites two Egyptian critics who studied in the West before Badawi's generation, Muhammad Mandur and Luwis ʻAwad. In addition, he discusses Badawi's cultural formation and university education, particularly in Alexandria University, and talks about how Badawi opened new venues for Arabic literary criticism and modern Arabic literature in Oxford, and later in London. Finally, the author shares some of the many lessons he learnt from Badawi.

This chapter notes that language has remained the key constituent in the Arabs' self-view and self-esteem. In early Islam, when Arabs had expanded their reach and had the opportunity to evaluate and assimilate the achievements of other people, we find in various contexts a readiness to credit each group with high attainments in one field of human endeavour. However, the Arabs are always said to be supreme in eloquence and command of language. This chapter discusses Arabic literature, with particular emphasis on the ‘elite’ and ‘folk’ forms of Arabic literature. It includes linguistic bifurcation, pre-Islamic poetry, Andalusian literature, and the interactions of elitist literature and common folk literature.